Glee -- Third Time Lucky 1: Swing, Swing
Title: Third Time Lucky
Chapter: 1. Swing, Swing
Fandom: Glee
Pairing: Karofsky/Kurt
Rating: R (…or F, for "Full of F-Bombs")
Word Count: 7,122
Warnings: language; underaged drinking; language; sporadic angststorms; language; talk of a religious nature; major spoilers through 2.11; sorta-spoilers through 2.15 ("Sexy")
Summary: Somehow the dead heat of summer gives rise to the mother(fucker) of all second chances. The road to redemption is paved with fights, phone calls, false starts, and more than a few jokes at the expense of the lovable Finn Hudson.
Author's Note: First of all, I apologize for the ten-clause note… Second, OMGLOOK, ten clauses!
1. This MONSTER fic is for eltea, my BFF/other-half/thorough and talented Halo-playing beta, who coaxed me properly into this pairing instead of letting me ship it behind closed doors for the rest of my futile existence. It is also for hiza_chan, my separated-at-birth twin, whom I am pretty sure is literally made of love, and whom I tried very hard to drag into this pairing as well. :D
2. I had sworn to myself that I would never write Glee fic. On Valentine's Day, I was bored and feeling crappy at work (incidentally, the circumstances under which almost eighty percent of this fic was written), and I had 2,000 words down before the day was out. Now I have sworn to myself that I will never write Glee fic again, because evidently it is the fandom equivalent of methamphetamine with a Pixy-Stick chaser.
3. …take that as your warning about my metaphorical tendencies.
4. Because of the time at which I started it, this is strictly only canon through "Silly Love Songs," although it observes almost everything that follows (and strongly favors "Blame It on the Alcohol"; anyone who's familiar with my other fic knows all about me and drunk scenes XD), so it's quasi-canonical up until "Original Song." Starting there, we're just going to pretend none of that ever happened. XD I sort of imply that the Warblers won Regionals (which I kind of think they should have; Darren Criss, please let me have your crazy-haired babies), but that's a different problem. Fill in your own Butterfly Effect. :D
5. Ignoring all of the incomprehensible stuff I just said above, I kept the Hummels' old house because I don't pay much attention to anything other than Chris Colfer's face when I'm watching …it's kickass.
6. I'm srs-face about the language warning, just in case it's problematic for you. I would like to do a search and find out how many times I drop the F-bomb, but I'm too scared.
7. Related: I use some words that aren't very nice when I feel that they're in-character. There is also a lot of this that is very personal for me, woven - often inelegantly - in with what I think are the respective characters' points of view. There's a whole lot more religious discussion than I intended, and I really did try to tread delicately, but if anything in here offends you or feels condescending, that was never my intention, and I sincerely apologize.
8. There is a place for talking about which characters you hate. That place is not here. I poke fun at… well, pretty much all of them, but I do it lovingly, and I'd appreciate it if we could keep the "If I met So-and-So in the street, I would shank him/her with a piece of broken glass" a long way away. Please and thanks. ♥
9. I am going to try to update daily, but editing and posting both take time, and I'm a bit low on time at the moment due to the convergence of a full-time job, a part-time job, two Shakespeare shows, and Script Frenzy. If I miss a day, it might be because I have actually died, so please hang tight until eltea hacks into my computer and posts the rest. XD
10. EN-FREAKING-JOY, and thank you just for getting this far - for clicking on the link, probably skimming this crap list (XD), and being willing to give this crazy thing a try. It's not terribly well-paced, and there are parts that fall a bit short of what I was shooting for, but I hope it keeps you reading and makes you smile. ♥
CHAPTER 1: SWING, SWING
To be honest, it’s too hot to go walking comfortably, but Finn invited Puck over to work on something top-secret for Glee Club despite the fact that it’s summer, and Kurt knows that the only surefire way not to distract them is to disappear completely. He heads for West McKinley Park-in the hopes of celebrating the general creativity of naming in this town, of course-and that… is where the trouble starts.
That’s where he rounds a corner of the meandering pavement path and sees David Karofsky sitting on the swings.
He stops short, Karofsky glances up, and it’s way too late to slip away-Kurt made the up-until-now intelligent decision to wear a bright turquoise T-shirt with a green paint-splatter motif to combat the heat. It’s one of his most swelter-friendly tops, but it makes blending into the background to vanish about as feasible as swing-dancing with an African elephant.
He’d just been starting to forget how it feels-the gut-clenching, knee-wobbling, throat-tightening, heart-racing, head-pounding terror that hounds him at the briefest, simplest glimpse of the young man squinting back at him. Kurt’s wit and tongue have always been his greatest-and often his only-weapons against a world that tries to crush him into mulch, and David Karofsky takes them away. David Karofsky makes him feel like he’s about to suffocate, and the panic is overwhelming.
There’s no one here, no protectors, no witnesses. Kurt still does that automatically; he did at Dalton; he does at home-without a conscious thought, he assesses the situation, searches for allies, and maps out escape routes. It’s like some subsidiary motor running just beneath the normal mechanics of his mind, and it leaps to the forefront to tell him he has nowhere to run. Karofsky’s big, but he’s fast; experience has also taught that he can move so close to silently that Kurt won’t even be able to anticipate the impact should he try to make a run for it.
Maybe it’s better to walk right up to the swings and politely request that Karofsky make it quick. Then again, the grass off the sides of the path will probably be nicer to get his face rubbed into than the tanbark on the playground; the tanbark has sharp edges everywhere, but if his punishment is just dirt and pressure, he can slip in the back door when he gets home and wash the worst of it off, and he’ll tell his dad he experimented unsuccessfully with a new cream last night-
Karofsky looks away. He kicks at the tanbark with one untied shoe, twisting his hand around the rusted chain to his right.
Kurt unfreezes-his joints unlock, and his thoughts stop spiraling quite so coldly-but he keeps very still, because the potential in uncertainty is almost worse than the constant oppression of fear.
Silence.
The swing chain creaks softly. Karofsky draws a circle in the tanbark with the toe of his tennis shoe. Kurt swallows. The bead of frigid sweat that winds down his backbone is almost refreshing.
Courage. It’s bullshit; Blaine doesn’t know a damn thing about what courage means. Blaine’s not the one curled up in the trenches, watching the mortars screaming through the sky. Blaine’s not the one who jumps every time a locker slams. Blaine’s not the one whose head would still be ringing two hours later in class, resonating off-key like a broken bell. Blaine’s not the one who craned his neck every night to look in the mirror and count the bruises on his shoulder-blades.
Kurt sets those shoulders (they’re half the width of Karofsky’s; this boy could literally tear him in two) and puts one foot forward, then the other. He watches the path and watches his feet gliding over it, practically of their own volition; it’s Blaine making him move. It’s not courage; it’s cowardice, thinking of what he’d have to say when Blaine calls if he had turned around and fled.
It’s worst when he’s just getting past, and Karofsky is out of his sightline. Kurt doesn’t believe in superstitions or omens or sixth senses or anything like that, but for once in his life, he can feel someone’s eyes boring into his back. His hands are trembling harder, and he wishes his heart would stop banging in his ears like Meg White on a bad day, because he’s straining for the soft crunch of rubber-soled sneakers touching down on tanbark and then swiveling to poise their owner for pursuit-
“Hummel,” Karofsky says.
Kurt wishes he hadn’t eaten breakfast. He wishes he hadn’t worn turquoise. He wishes he hadn’t picked his white hat to match, because it’ll fall off if he bolts, and he loves this hat, but he’ll leave it behind.
He wishes he’d never been born.
Having been born seems somewhat unnecessary, if the trajectory of his life so far has brought him to this.
He wishes he didn’t clench his jaw and turn and meet Karofsky’s burning black-hole gaze.
He wants to say something pithy-snap “Karofsky?” or, better, deadpan “David,” because then it’s a status choice. But he can barely force his breath through his throat; his voice will never fit.
“Why’d you do it?” Karofsky asks-demands. It’s more of an order than a question.
But it’s civil-at least more so than any of the interactions they’ve had for as long as Kurt’s flinching, Pavlovian mind can remember.
That’s… confusing. And the confusion sends fissures running all throughout the fear, and into those cracks seeps the anger.
It’s Karofsky’s fault.
It’s all Karofsky’s fault.
Everything that’s happened-everything Kurt’s felt, every stab of terror, every strangling swell of anxiety; every glance over his shoulder, every startle at shadows, every night waited out and every caffeine crash to follow; every numbing whiteout when too many kinds of desperation layered over each other’s holes-they’re all Karofsky.
For the first time, he starts to look just a little bit small. Maybe he is, compared to all of the aftershocks.
“Do what?” Kurt says. He knows his voice goes high when it sharpens, but he’d rather have the pointedness. “Call you on your shit? Try to get you expelled for a death threat? Decide to be gay? Christ, Karofsky; I didn’t realize-I’m so sorry I’ve made your life so fucking difficult.”
Karofsky doesn’t even shift to shrug it off. The boy is a mountain, and there’s nothing Kurt can do.
“Why didn’t you tell my dad about what I did?” he asks.
Kurt apprehends a sudden and deep understanding of the word falter-everything shudders to a halt and then… tips.
At its center, though, the question’s easy; it’s one he’s held himself accountable for a hundred-thousand times.
He clears his throat and looks without seeing at the decal on Karofsky’s shirt. “What difference would it have made? Neither of us would have gained anything, you would have been outed before you were ready, and everyone would have flipped.” Kurt looks Karofsky in the eyes again, holding his ground now. “I don’t care about revenge, Karofsky. I just want this to be over.”
Karofsky kicks at the ground again, summoning a spray of bark, and Kurt flinches. The shame comes hot on the heels of the reflex, but Karofsky says nothing.
At least, he doesn’t until Kurt musters his courage and turns to go.
“You shouldn’t have.”
“I’m sorry,” Kurt says, swiveling back to stare at him; “did I stutter? Or was some part of ‘I didn’t want to apply my biases to your burden’ objectionable to you?”
Karofsky’s eyes narrow. Either he’s been sitting here long enough to sunburn, or there’s blood rising to his cheeks-the kind of blood that will be pouring out of Kurt’s nose in a minute if he doesn’t stop being such an idiot.
“Hummel, now I owe you something,” Karofsky says.
“I don’t understand you,” Kurt says, coldly against the hot prickle of sweat where the hat sits on his hairline; against the white light pressing on his bare skin; against the heavy-thrumming tension strung between them, just waiting to snap back. “You treat me like a chew toy until I hurt and impose on everyone I care about just to get away from you, and then you owe me something? Well, owe me a promise that you’ll leave me the hell alone starting today, and let’s forget that you tore my life apart and call ourselves even.”
Karofsky gets up-with that smooth, incongruous, terrifying grace-and Kurt automatically takes three steps back.
“You plan to play a martyr for the rest of your life?” Karofsky asks. “’Cause that’s great if you want people to keep crucifying you, but you’re never going to get any respect.”
“I don’t want your respect,” Kurt spits. “I thought I made it pretty unequivocal that I never want to see you again. Ideally, I’d like to forget you ever existed, but I think I’ve probably got too many traumatic triggers for that to happen in the conceivable future.” It’s stupid to say what he says next, but he’s only been getting stupider since he chose not to run. “Do you know what it feels like, Karofsky? Do you have any idea what it’s like to wake up every morning and wonder if today’s the day you finally drown in your own fear?”
Karofsky’s eyes are dark and unreadable.
“Yeah,” he says. “I’ve got a pretty good fucking idea, actually.”
Kurt wants to turn around and walk away. He wants to say something cutting about boulders and glass houses, and then he wants to leave. He wants Karofsky to feel some fraction of the hurt he knows so intimately that it’s knitted to his soul.
But there’s some piece of incorruptible humanity in him, and deep, deep (deep, deep, deep, deep) down… he can’t let another person do this alone.
“People are starting to figure it out,” Karofsky says, and Kurt sees it-just a glimmer of a desperation he knows, of the miserable acceptance that being himself will never quite amount to enough. Karofsky looks at the corkscrew slide; it’s so old all the bolts are rusted over, and there’s better-left-unidentified gunk in the cracks between the plastic segments. They probably both played on it when they were kids, quite possibly at the same time. It was a monument then, something monstrous, and to slide down and survive was, for a child, like defying death itself. Kurt is hoping and hoping and hoping that someday, in retrospect, today looks like that slide does now.
Karofsky shoves his hands into his pockets even though it’s too warm for that, too. “I think Finn knows.”
Kurt would have expected an accusation in that, but he can’t pick one out. “I doubt it. If Finn ever figures it out, it’ll be two weeks after everyone else in the state of Ohio got the memo on your personal stationery.”
“I don’t have fucking stationery,” Karofsky says. “And I swear-fuck it; it doesn’t matter. The point is…”
“Finding a way to hide?” Kurt finishes, fighting the sardonic tone that comes so easily to his voice.
Karofsky glares at him, then glares at the ground, then kicks at the tanbark, then nods.
Kurt draws a fortifying breath. Blaine was wrong. Courage is not confronting his persecutor. It’s not taking the high road. It’s not turning the other cheek. It’s not fighting back.
Courage is stepping off of the path, crossing the tanbark, and sitting down in the other swing.
“Don’t try to overcompensate,” Kurt says, and his voice sounds steadier than he expects. “I had to make out with Brittany for almost half an hour before my dad could be bothered to walk in on us.”
Karofsky stands there for a minute, watching him warily, looking like an unmoored ship. Then he moves over and drops back into the seat of his swing again, and the chains clink.
“Everybody at McKinley High has made out with Brittany,” he says. “Including most of the teachers.”
“I’m going to have nightmares,” Kurt says calmly. “But that’s irrelevant, because that approach doesn’t work. Honestly, I think the best strategy is to try to stay completely neutral. Positioning yourself at either end of the spectrum makes you look suspicious.”
Karofsky jumps up again. “This is fucking stupid. I’m not talking to you about this.”
Kurt crosses his legs, folds his arms, and raises his eyebrows. “Fine by me. Lucky for you, Lima is full of gay mentors, and you can take your pick.”
Slightly tellingly, instead of strangling him with the swing chain, Karofsky puts his frustrated energy into pacing instead. “Shut the fuck up, Hummel. I have this reputation now; if I backtrack all of a sudden, everyone’s going to know some shit’s up.”
“That’s what I mean,” Kurt says. “You can’t do a one-eighty; you need to shoot for… a subtle gradation into inconspicuousness.”
Karofsky stops pacing, presumably because it’s hard to fix Kurt with that kind of a look while in motion.
“You’re giving me the blank stare,” Kurt observes. It’s eerily similar to the one he gets from Finn at least twice daily (and four to eight times when he’s been out shopping). “Why are you giving me the blank stare?”
“Because you talk in strings of fucking SAT words,” Karofsky says.
Kurt frowns at him. “Don’t make me tell you that you’re smart, Karofsky. That’s not why I’m here.”
Karofsky’s twice-the-width-of-Kurt’s shoulders tense. “Don’t fucking patronize me, Hummel.”
The urge to slap his forehead is extremely strong, but he’ll mess up his hat. “Thank you for proving my point with poignant irony.”
“That’s exactly my point!” Karofsky fires back.
Kurt bites the inside of his cheek for a long moment, focusing on the pinch of it, and then takes another deep breath of dead-humid air. “Never mind. I was trying to say that if you change things a little bit at a time, no one will really notice.”
“See, that finally sounds like English,” Karofsky mutters. He scuffs his feet at the tanbark, taking his hands out of the pockets of his jeans and then putting them back again. It’s slightly strange seeing him out of his letterman jacket. Kurt wonders briefly if he stumbled into a wormhole en route to the park and subsequently fell into an alternate universe, but it’s probably just too hot today for extra layers, whatever they’re made of. “It’s still bullshit, though. I can’t change.”
“Well, you can’t keep going like you are,” Kurt says. “And those are kind of your only two options.”
“Obviously I can,” Karofsky says, “since I have been, and it’s fine.”
Kurt bristles, but he manages to stay in the swing for now-not that he’d be any more threatening if he stood up to face the wall of muscle on the other side of this argument.
“I take it back,” he says. “You’re an idiot, Karofsky. I mean, honestly? If you think being so scared you have to smash people into lockers to make yourself feel big and being so repressed that you-well, you do what you did after that counts as ‘fine’… then you’re not just stupid; you’re hopeless. And there’s nothing I can do for you.”
Karofsky’s glare still makes Kurt’s stomach twist itself into knots. “Big goddamn surprise.”
Kurt should just leave him to it. Kurt should get up and walk away, because Karofsky hasn’t done anything to earn his generosity-much closer to the opposite, really. No one would ever blame Kurt for giving up now; he’s tried, and he’s been brave about it. This is enough. He’s more than paid his dues.
But he’s the only person in the world who’s met the real David Karofsky-who’s seen through all the static.
“Can we talk about it?” he says, even though he’d rather jump into a pit of alligators while wearing Lady GaGa’s meat dress. “What happened in the locker room. I think-I feel like we’re both avoiding it for different reasons, and… it’ll really help clear the air if we can face it together.”
Karofsky is silent for a long moment. His back’s turned, and Kurt can see the tautness of every muscle straining to take this conversation back-to unspeak every word of it. Kurt can’t say he doesn’t sympathize.
He also can’t say he doesn’t expect The Fury to be getting acquainted with the bridge of his nose in a matter of seconds.
“I’ve been right all along,” Karofsky says, curling his fingers slowly into fists, and ohdearGod Kurt is dead. “Glee Club really does turn everybody into a homo-hippie.”
“Well, you’re halfway there,” Kurt snaps. “If you’d rather sing about it, I’d be happy to oblige.”
Karofsky’s gaze must be burning a hole in the teeter-totter; just his voice is incinerating. “Fuck Glee Club; fuck talking about it; and fuck you, Hummel, because nothing happened, so there’s nothing to say.”
“Excuse me?” Kurt cuts in, and he’s up out of the swing now, which is stupid, too, because he can’t deny how much smaller he is when there’s a direct comparison. “It was something on so many levels I don’t even know where to start. Are you attracted to me?”
Karofsky whirls on him, a towering presence of blazing eyes and an absolutely staggering potential to hurt. “Fuck off, Hummel.”
“What, then?” Kurt asks, persevering through the tightness in his chest, through the horrific reality that he’s literally standing in Karofsky’s shadow and shaking all over. “To the concept of me? To the idea of being out and proud and honest with yourself? Am I some kind of metaphor to you?”
Karofsky’s hands rise, and Kurt braces for impact, his heart pausing in its feverish throbbing just long enough to slam down into his diaphragm at the thought of getting all the blood out of these clothes.
He flinches when Karofsky fists both hands in his shirtfront and hauls him in close-dangerously close, dizzyingly close, so close that Kurt can feel Karofsky’s hot, fast breath on his face, and everything beyond the other boy’s outline blurs into a haze of heat.
“I am not a fucking AP English project, Hummel,” Karofsky hisses. “It was nothing, and if you bring it up one more time-”
What can he promise that he hasn’t before?
“If it’s nothing,” Kurt says, “do it again.”
Partly he needs to know. Partly he needs to be wanted.
No one except David Karofsky has ever wanted him before.
The silence goes on for years, for decades, for at least four full seconds and possibly four and a half. For this one, unstable moment, they’re virtually the same-Kurt sees the same gears spinning without catching behind Karofsky’s eyes; sees the same fear; the same something-like-a-hope, but it’s tainted and muddled and sick-
Karofsky opens his hands, steps back, turns around, and walks away.
Kurt swallows a few times. He stumbles back and reaches for the base of the swing, putting a hand against the metal pole for balance. He swallows again and musters his voice enough to call at Karofsky’s retreating back.
“I’ll be here at the same time tomorrow whether you are or not.”
He wasn’t expecting an answer, and he doesn’t get one.
Kurt Hummel is stupid.
Kurt Hummel is sitting on the-what is this stuff they make playgrounds out of? Rubber composite?-steps that lead up to the platform styled like a spaceship, leaning into the insufficient shade cast by the console.
He doesn’t really know what to anticipate. It all depends on how desperate Karofsky’s isolation has led him to become.
Kurt goes back and forth on the question. Obviously Karofsky presents himself as the ultimate tough guy, but-equally obviously, at least to the privileged few-centimeters past that, he’s a wreck.
So Kurt does the stupid thing and waits.
He hasn’t mentioned yesterday to anyone. He loves his father more than anything in the universe, but Dad would jump to conclusions and then jump for a firearm, and Kurt can’t afford overprotection when the only way to get through to Karofsky is to be even more vulnerable than he is. Finn… is Finn; enough said. Carole would worry about him; Mercedes already does, and the tentative What’s up, diva? Everybody R-E-S-P-E-C-Ting your space? emails she’d send while he was at Dalton kind of broke his heart.
He should have told Blaine-if only because Blaine’s pretty much the single other person out there who would be able to contextualize, knowing what he does. But even Blaine wouldn’t quite understand, because Blaine has never hated himself down to his core.
Kurt pushes his hair back and plucks at the collar of today’s neon T-shirt, trying to circulate a little bit of air. He wasn’t exactly watching the clock yesterday to time when he arrived, so it’s not like he can say Karofsky’s late.
Anyway, “late” requires intent to show. For all Kurt knows, he’s wasting two precious hours of a summertime Tuesday on a dead end. For all he knows, he got his revenge after all, and he’s scared Karofsky off for good. It’ll be back to Dalton in August, and everything will be hunky-dory, except of course for the intense psychological trauma and the panic attacks and the sea of navy uniforms that makes him feel like his lungs are full of water even when he sings. Except for not being strong enough to refuse his parents’ sacrifice and fight his battles instead of abandoning all of the small victories when he flees the field.
And look how well that worked given where he is now.
To say that Kurt’s feeling cynical by the time Karofsky solidifies amongst the heat shimmers in the distance is roughly akin to describing Santana as a slightly vindictive young woman.
Karofsky doesn’t look Kurt in the eyes as he approaches, kick-shuffles his way through the tanbark, and takes up leaning against one of the pillars that supports the stairs. He folds his arms, looks over the park-Kurt’s ingrained paranoia doesn’t have to double-check; they’re the only ones here-and exhales with just a hint of a sigh.
“Shitty weather,” he says.
That’s a peace offering if Kurt’s ever seen one.
…it’s a really damn good thing Kurt’s gayer than a newly-decorated maypole; Karofsky drops hints and speaks in code more than most girls.
“Abysmal,” Kurt says, keeping his tone light and noncommittal. “I’m sure it’s an educational conspiracy that the only time they free us is when it’s too hot to get into trouble.”
Karofsky is quiet for a moment. “You’re too much of a goody-two-shoes to make trouble even when the weather is good.”
“Doesn’t tend to be a problem,” Kurt replies. “Cliché as it is, trouble usually finds me. Then it beats the crap out of me and takes my lunch money.”
“School lunch at McKinley is a rip-off,” Karofsky says. “And probably poisoned.”
“Preach,” Kurt says, and he thinks-it’s hard to tell from this angle-that the corners of Karofsky’s mouth twitch.
There’s an almost-comfortable pause.
“Is it any better at Pansy Academy?” Karofsky asks.
“There are lots of organic and vegetarian options,” Kurt says.
“Take that as a ‘no.’”
Kurt wishes he wasn’t grinning, but it’s too late. “Shut up; I like leeks.”
Karofsky glances at him, and his expression is priceless. “What the fuck is a leek?”
“I’ll show you sometime,” Kurt says airily. “They don’t bite very hard.”
“Oh, my God,” Karofsky says. “Go to hell, Hummel.”
Time to start asking the hard questions.
Kurt takes another deep breath, drawing the heat into his lungs. “Do you believe in that? Hell for the homosexuals, I mean.”
Karofsky is utterly motionless-except to blink-for so long that Kurt has to stop holding his breath.
“I don’t know,” he says when the moment’s passed. “They say it in church all the fucking time.”
If Kurt learned one thing from his dad’s heart attack, it was to tell the people that you love just how much you need them every single day, because Murphy’s Law dictates that when shit happens, it’s always after you’ve had a fight. If he learned a second thing, it’s that you can’t argue with a belief.
He crosses his legs, sets one elbow on his knee, and sits for a minute, untangling the threads of exactly what he wants to say. Karofsky glances at him more than once but doesn’t interrupt.
“I’m not religious,” Kurt says, “but to my understanding, in the long run, what God wills is absolute. Is that right?”
Karofsky is frowning-he has remarkably expressive eyebrows-but he says, “I guess.”
“Okay. To my understanding, the Bible is man’s best attempt at explaining the will of God, and priests do their best to interpret that for the rest of us. Fair so far?”
Karofsky shifts uncomfortably. “I don’t know. Sure, whatever.”
“And God is so incredibly vast and powerful that He transcends humanity, correct?”
Karofsky avoids looking at him. “Where the hell are you going with this, Hummel?”
Kurt waits until Karofsky’s gaze darts to him and holds it. “All I’m saying is that if God is… well, God, then the Bible can’t quite conceptualize Him, because it was transcribed by human beings. And the priest interpreting the Bible adds another layer of human fallibility. So if a priest tells you that God thinks you’re going to hell, I’d say there’s a pretty good chance that God’s real message got lost in translation. This…” A spark of bewilderment tending towards horror lights up in him as he sees his right hand reach out and press his index finger into the center of Karofsky’s chest. “…is between you and God.”
He can almost-kind-of feel the heart beating just a few inches from his fingertip. Then Karofsky steps back, and Kurt withdraws his hand before he gets it ripped off and shoved down his throat.
They spend another long, silent moment looking at each other, Karofsky suspicious, Kurt trying to seem innocent and well-intentioned. He’s hoping that his baby blues will get him off the hook. It always works with Carole.
Maybe it’s worked here; maybe it hasn’t-Karofsky looks away.
“What denomination are you?” Kurt asks. “If it’s not too personal.”
“It is,” Karofsky says flatly.
Yes, Kurt can take a hint.
He admires his shoe-after all, it’s his shoe, so it is good to look at-and scuffs it against the possibly-rubber-composite step.
“You got plans for the summer?” Karofsky mutters after a while.
“Sort of.” Kurt repositions his foot away from what might, many eons ago, have been chewing gum. “I’m going to work for my dad a little, but he doesn’t have the budget for much time, and since it’s going towards the same thing anyway… I figure I might apply to work at the toy store downtown to try to get a little money together.”
Karofsky’s quiet for a moment. “You’re going back to Pansy School?”
Kurt folds his arms on his knees. “Where else am I supposed to go?” He wasn’t expecting an answer this time either. At least Karofsky’s predictable in one respect. “And as much as I may sometimes object to the character-or lack of character-of the student body… I think Dalton’s good for me. It’s hard work, and I feel like I’m actually thinking.” The sweat starting to bead on his forehead will sabotage his bangs; he does some surreptitious damage control-and then pauses to wonder why he cares how Karofsky thinks he looks. “And it sounds mercenary, but it’s going to be excellent to put on my college applications if I can keep my grades up. I need that. I need to get out of this town.”
“Hummel,” Karofsky says disinterestedly, “if you put up with Lima’s bullshit, nothing is going to faze you anywhere else.”
“I believe that’s New York, actually,” Kurt says. “And the phrase is ‘If you can make it here’-”
“How’s your pansy boyfriend?”
“I don’t have a pansy boyfriend. I don’t have any kind of boyfriend, inconceivable as I know that sounds.”
Karofsky can’t take a hint.
“The Pansy School boyfriend,” he says, quietly still-quietly so far. There’s a rumble underneath it, like an engine turning over. “The one you told.”
“He wasn’t about to tell anyone else,” Kurt says. “He just wanted to protect me.”
“By trying to out me in front of half the school,” Karofsky says, and there’s a jagged edge to his voice. “Nice fuckin’ guy, your pansy boyfriend. Nice of him to tell you how to act and then leave.”
“He’s not my boyfriend, he’s not like that, and he is nice,” Kurt says, hearing his own voice rise, unable to stop himself from getting to his feet to join it. “He just wanted to help you, too, and if you’d been willing to listen-”
“In the middle of the stairwell?” Karofsky looks at him-from below for the first time Kurt can think of-and narrows his eyes until they’re gleaming slits in the too-bright sunshine. “Yeah, Hummel. They should just make the guy a fucking saint for knowing better than everybody else what their lives are like, and what they should do and say and be just because he’s been that. Do his parents pay for his asshole lessons, or do they give you those for free at Dalton? ’Cause you’re never going to beat him in that class, college apps or not.”
“Stop it!” There’s that rough-almost-breaking note to his scream; Kurt hates that about his voice; every order starts to sound like a plea. “Blaine is the only person in my entire life that I could talk to about what you did to me. And you’re right about Lima, Karofsky; and you’re right about me-I’m not taking this shit from you.”
“Quit being such a fucking drama queen,” Karofsky says, an almost impressively distinct curl of disdain to his lip. “I can spot douchebags like you can find Macy’s sales-”
“That’s because you are one!” Kurt shouts at him.
Karofsky is not happy. Kurt is back to wondering whether death will be efficient in Karofsky’s impatience or slow and agonizing to fit the crime.
“Look,” Karofsky hisses, “the dude was playing both of us, because his whole life so far’s told him he’s got everything figured out. Just because he’s the first fag who ever wanted to talk to you doesn’t me-”
Kurt jumps off of the side of the stairs, ignoring the flare of pain in his knees and the spray of tanbark as he hits the ground, and starts for home before he gets into another fight he absolutely cannot win.
“Hummel!” Karofsky calls after him. “Forget it! Come on! Do you have to be this much of a bitch all the time?”
Never mind. Kurt’s going to fight this one anyway; at least he’ll die in a blaze of glory for a worthy cause.
He storms back and gets close enough to feel the heat radiating off of Karofsky’s broad, barrel chest.
“Number one,” he hisses, fearless and almost blind with the anger teeming in his battered heart; “if you call Blaine a fag again, I’m writing a letter to the editor of the Lima Herald about institutionalized homophobia and closeted gays, I’m going to use your first and last name, and I’m going to mail a clipping of it to Jacob Ben Israel. Number two: if you call me a bitch one more time, I’m leaving right now, and if you ever come near me again, I’ll file for a restraining order.”
Kurt pants a little to catch his breath, squirming inwardly at the knowledge of how farcical his tiny-boy rage must look to a freaking defensive lineman. But so far, Karofsky is silent, staring down at him, dark eyes on his, mouth in a line.
Kurt is not looking at Karofsky’s mouth.
Kurt is never going to look at Karofsky’s mouth ever again, for as long as he lives; and if he does, he’s going to put his own eyes out with a mechanical pencil, as Oedipus would have done had he attended Dalton and been obsessed with school supplies.
“That’s really kind of fucked-up,” Karofsky says after a brief eternity of Kurt trying to catch his breath without looking like the idiot he is. “You’re the gayest person in Ohio, but you’ve got more balls than anyone I’ve ever met.”
It takes Kurt a moment to realize that the choking, hiccup-like sound that just wriggled out of his throat was at least forty percent laughter.
He fumbles behind him for the cool metal of the staircase railing and sits down on the lowest step this time.
“Karofsky,” he says, “what in the hell am I doing here?”
The nuances of this question seem to have evaded its audience. “…talking. You kind of do that a lot.”
“No,” Kurt says. “Why am I talking to you?”
“Well, there’s no one else here, so I guess it was either that or talking to yourself.”
Kurt puts a hand over his mouth. He’s laughing again, only a little bit hysterically.
Karofsky scowls. “What?”
“Nothing,” Kurt says. “It’s just-doesn’t this occur to you as the slightest bit weird?”
Karofsky shrugs and kicks the pole. “My whole fucking life is weird.”
Kurt pushes his hair back and then tries to fix it, which doesn’t work so well without a mirror. “If we’re going to keep…” No. “We need to set some ground rules here. Okay?”
Karofsky shrugs again. Then he kicks the pole again. Kurt takes that as acquiescence.
“Let’s start simply,” Kurt says. “You don’t get down on my friends-any of them-and I won’t push you on any subject you don’t want to talk about.”
He wasn’t really intending to press Karofsky if he ever ran into another of those topics-it comes back to the whole not wanting to die thing-but this needs to sound like a mutual deal, and he needs to make Karofsky feel safe.
In a shocking turn of events, Karofsky raises his shoulders and knocks his shoe against the pole.
“Whatever,” he says. “Sure.”
That will have to do.
“Fabulous,” Kurt says. “And I know fabulous.” He looks at Karofsky sideways. “To go back to the previous thread of conversation, what are your summer plans?”
Karofsky… shrugs.
This may be hopeless after all.
“I’m just kind of staying out of the house,” he says after a moment or two. “I’m kind of staying away from… everyone.”
It’s unsettling-to say the least-to think of David Karofsky, linebacker and life-ruiner, pitcher of slushies and practitioner of Jungle Law, as… lonely.
Then again, it was more than unsettling to adjust to thinking of him as a deeply-closeted homosexual fueled by fear and self-loathing in equal quantities, and Kurt’s already had to do that.
“Is there a particular reason?” Kurt asks. “Other than the general-and completely reasonable-feeling that you’re deliberately deceiving everyone when you hang out with people you aren’t going to tell.”
“Mostly that,” Karofsky says, and then he looks startled that he did.
Kurt knows very well that he’s still walking on a minefield, but it’s getting to be kind of like Minesweeper now, where there are color-coded numbers to steer him away from sudden, explosive death.
“I hear you,” he says. “I hated that period. It just sucks.”
As he’d held his breath and hoped, at the offhand implication that it’s a phase and will eventually end, there’s a flicker in Karofsky’s expression of something akin to comfort.
“I was lucky,” Kurt goes on, masking the cautious particularity with which he selects his words. “I had Mercedes-and New Directions. Obviously many of them weren’t cool with it in any way, shape, or form, but they came around, because… that’s what friends do. They prioritize who you are over what you are, at least in the long run.”
“I can’t join fucking Glee Club,” Karofsky says. Kurt spares a portion of a moment to be amused at the not-unappealing thought of fucking Glee Club, because every single person in New Directions is extremely attractive, at least aesthetically speaking. “I was only in that shit for a week, and you probably heard how that went.”
“I didn’t have to hear about it,” Kurt tells him. “I saw the halftime show. David, you were good.”
Karofsky kicks the tanbark this time, slightly more viciously than he usually does. “Fuck off, Hummel; it’s not funny.”
“That’s because I’m not joking,” Kurt says. He crosses his legs at the knee again and raises his eyebrows. “I am an unchallenged-except for Rachel-connoisseur of musical theater and all related enterprises. I know talent when I see it.”
Karofsky’s face is dark and kind of pinched now. “Seriously, Hummel. Don’t fucking start with me.”
That would be a blank square in the corner surrounded by squares blazoned with the number one.
And Kurt did hear about it, because McKinley High is small, and eventually even Rachel gets tired of talking about the love dodecahedron she claims a vertex of. Kurt heard about the struggles, the reversals, the slushies, the quitting, and the comebacks. He’s known all of those sensations, and he’s the only one who can piece together Karofsky’s journey in full, from the inside.
“The thing is,” Kurt says slowly, “you don’t have to be in New Directions to sing. The community aspect of it is really helpful, of course, for the collaborations and the feedback, but you can treat it like a hobby on your own time and get the glee without the club.”
There’s a pause.
“You just got even gayer,” Karofsky says. “I didn’t think that was possible.”
“You can’t convince me you don’t sing in the shower,” Kurt persists, choosing to ignore that comment before he picks another ill-fated fight.
“Can we not talk about what I do and definitely don’t do in the shower, Hummel?” Karofsky says.
“What’s your favorite song?” Kurt asks.
“I don’t have one.”
“Like hell. Everybody does. What’s one of your favorite songs, then?”
“I don’t listen to music,” Karofsky says. “I’m deaf.”
Kurt stares at him. He doesn’t crack a smile.
“You have an extraordinarily good deadpan,” Kurt says.
He cracks a smile.
“Unfortunately, if you don’t suggest a favorite song for us to duet to,” Kurt says airily, “I guess I’ll have to pick one of mine.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Karofsky mutters. “I dunno. I like-guy stuff. Classic rock and metal and shit.”
Kurt pauses. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to be a little bit more specific.”
“Go into Finn’s iTunes and pick something that’s not on a playlist called ‘Glee Club Is My Life’ or ‘I Love Rachel And/Or Quinn.’”
Kurt stares for a second, and then he’s laughing again, incredulous but genuine. Karofsky cracks another smile.
“You’re kind of a dick, Karofsky,” Kurt says. “It’s awesome.”
The smile gets a little wider.
“I’ll find something tonight,” Kurt goes on. This is the part that might take off and might spectacularly fail, and if it’s the latter, he could be running for his life in a second. “I’m pretty sure Finn’s going to be out until dinnertime the day after tomorrow, and my parents are both working. If you wanted to hang out somewhere with air-conditioning and carpeting that’s made of something other than tanbark… well, yeah. We could do that.” He watches Karofsky’s face. “Better acoustics, too.”
Karofsky glances at him and then at the trees Kurt always scraped his knees climbing because he was so small and so stubborn even at the age of six. “If you’re bullshitting me, Hummel-”
“I’m not. Air-conditioning, carpet, couches, and food, but you have to sing. Take it or leave it.”
Karofsky sets his jaw, and his eyes narrow again. Kurt’s starting to think that’s an automatic reflex-or some kind of last-ditch shield.
“What kind of food?” Karofsky asks.
“Slushies,” Kurt says.
“You b-” Karofsky grits his teeth. “God damn you, Hummel.”
“I thought we decided that was between me and Him.”
Karofsky shakes his head, but not before Kurt sees the telltale flicker of a smile.
Kurt’s phone tweedles cheerfully, and he fishes it out of his pocket to see the text.
It’s from Finn. Kurt is more resigned than surprised when he reads help broke th oven nuthn on fire bt mom will kill me help?
Kurt sighs. “Apparently I need to go rescue my dumbass brother.” He hesitates, even though-God, he’s being so stupid. “See you Thursday at my place?”
“Same time?” Karofsky asks.
“Yeah, if it works for you.”
Karofsky pauses for a second. “Given how much you save his ass, maybe Finn should be the one at Pansy School.”
Kurt grins. “He’d flunk out. See you later.”
He can still feel Karofsky’s gaze on his back as he heads off-a faint prickling on his shoulder-blades, just slightly warmer than the day’s heat. It still makes him jumpy, which he understands; the kind of psychological conditioning he’s unintentionally undergone can’t be glossed over by two conversations in the park.
But it’s different. It’s better, at least for now.
Once Kurt has swept in to WikiHow oven repair (not his best idea, but no one gets burnt or electrocuted, and it seems to work) and drifted back to his bedroom, waving off Finn’s groveling thanks, he curls up in his bowl chair, chews on his lip, and hits his second speed-dial.
“What’s up?” Mercedes asks, picking up halfway through the second ring.
“Not a lot,” Kurt says. “You want to do coffee tomorrow?”
There is a brief silence.
“We could do coffee now,” Mercedes offers carefully.
This is Girl Code.
“It’s not urgent,” Kurt says warmly. “Tomorrow’s fine. Is ten in the morning good for you?”
“You bet,” Mercedes says, sounding slightly relieved. “See you then.”
“Perfect,” Kurt sighs, meaning it. “You will always be my favorite, chica. Ta.”
“Later, Kurt.”
Kurt puts the phone down. Then he picks it up again and navigates to the iTunes store, where he types guy stuff into the query bar.
iTunes thinks he is an idiot. He has to concede the point.
[Chapter 2]
Chapter: 1. Swing, Swing
Fandom: Glee
Pairing: Karofsky/Kurt
Rating: R (…or F, for "Full of F-Bombs")
Word Count: 7,122
Warnings: language; underaged drinking; language; sporadic angststorms; language; talk of a religious nature; major spoilers through 2.11; sorta-spoilers through 2.15 ("Sexy")
Summary: Somehow the dead heat of summer gives rise to the mother(fucker) of all second chances. The road to redemption is paved with fights, phone calls, false starts, and more than a few jokes at the expense of the lovable Finn Hudson.
Author's Note: First of all, I apologize for the ten-clause note… Second, OMGLOOK, ten clauses!
1. This MONSTER fic is for eltea, my BFF/other-half/thorough and talented Halo-playing beta, who coaxed me properly into this pairing instead of letting me ship it behind closed doors for the rest of my futile existence. It is also for hiza_chan, my separated-at-birth twin, whom I am pretty sure is literally made of love, and whom I tried very hard to drag into this pairing as well. :D
2. I had sworn to myself that I would never write Glee fic. On Valentine's Day, I was bored and feeling crappy at work (incidentally, the circumstances under which almost eighty percent of this fic was written), and I had 2,000 words down before the day was out. Now I have sworn to myself that I will never write Glee fic again, because evidently it is the fandom equivalent of methamphetamine with a Pixy-Stick chaser.
3. …take that as your warning about my metaphorical tendencies.
4. Because of the time at which I started it, this is strictly only canon through "Silly Love Songs," although it observes almost everything that follows (and strongly favors "Blame It on the Alcohol"; anyone who's familiar with my other fic knows all about me and drunk scenes XD), so it's quasi-canonical up until "Original Song." Starting there, we're just going to pretend none of that ever happened. XD I sort of imply that the Warblers won Regionals (which I kind of think they should have; Darren Criss, please let me have your crazy-haired babies), but that's a different problem. Fill in your own Butterfly Effect. :D
5. Ignoring all of the incomprehensible stuff I just said above, I kept the Hummels' old house because I don't pay much attention to anything other than Chris Colfer's face when I'm watching …it's kickass.
6. I'm srs-face about the language warning, just in case it's problematic for you. I would like to do a search and find out how many times I drop the F-bomb, but I'm too scared.
7. Related: I use some words that aren't very nice when I feel that they're in-character. There is also a lot of this that is very personal for me, woven - often inelegantly - in with what I think are the respective characters' points of view. There's a whole lot more religious discussion than I intended, and I really did try to tread delicately, but if anything in here offends you or feels condescending, that was never my intention, and I sincerely apologize.
8. There is a place for talking about which characters you hate. That place is not here. I poke fun at… well, pretty much all of them, but I do it lovingly, and I'd appreciate it if we could keep the "If I met So-and-So in the street, I would shank him/her with a piece of broken glass" a long way away. Please and thanks. ♥
9. I am going to try to update daily, but editing and posting both take time, and I'm a bit low on time at the moment due to the convergence of a full-time job, a part-time job, two Shakespeare shows, and Script Frenzy. If I miss a day, it might be because I have actually died, so please hang tight until eltea hacks into my computer and posts the rest. XD
10. EN-FREAKING-JOY, and thank you just for getting this far - for clicking on the link, probably skimming this crap list (XD), and being willing to give this crazy thing a try. It's not terribly well-paced, and there are parts that fall a bit short of what I was shooting for, but I hope it keeps you reading and makes you smile. ♥
CHAPTER 1: SWING, SWING
To be honest, it’s too hot to go walking comfortably, but Finn invited Puck over to work on something top-secret for Glee Club despite the fact that it’s summer, and Kurt knows that the only surefire way not to distract them is to disappear completely. He heads for West McKinley Park-in the hopes of celebrating the general creativity of naming in this town, of course-and that… is where the trouble starts.
That’s where he rounds a corner of the meandering pavement path and sees David Karofsky sitting on the swings.
He stops short, Karofsky glances up, and it’s way too late to slip away-Kurt made the up-until-now intelligent decision to wear a bright turquoise T-shirt with a green paint-splatter motif to combat the heat. It’s one of his most swelter-friendly tops, but it makes blending into the background to vanish about as feasible as swing-dancing with an African elephant.
He’d just been starting to forget how it feels-the gut-clenching, knee-wobbling, throat-tightening, heart-racing, head-pounding terror that hounds him at the briefest, simplest glimpse of the young man squinting back at him. Kurt’s wit and tongue have always been his greatest-and often his only-weapons against a world that tries to crush him into mulch, and David Karofsky takes them away. David Karofsky makes him feel like he’s about to suffocate, and the panic is overwhelming.
There’s no one here, no protectors, no witnesses. Kurt still does that automatically; he did at Dalton; he does at home-without a conscious thought, he assesses the situation, searches for allies, and maps out escape routes. It’s like some subsidiary motor running just beneath the normal mechanics of his mind, and it leaps to the forefront to tell him he has nowhere to run. Karofsky’s big, but he’s fast; experience has also taught that he can move so close to silently that Kurt won’t even be able to anticipate the impact should he try to make a run for it.
Maybe it’s better to walk right up to the swings and politely request that Karofsky make it quick. Then again, the grass off the sides of the path will probably be nicer to get his face rubbed into than the tanbark on the playground; the tanbark has sharp edges everywhere, but if his punishment is just dirt and pressure, he can slip in the back door when he gets home and wash the worst of it off, and he’ll tell his dad he experimented unsuccessfully with a new cream last night-
Karofsky looks away. He kicks at the tanbark with one untied shoe, twisting his hand around the rusted chain to his right.
Kurt unfreezes-his joints unlock, and his thoughts stop spiraling quite so coldly-but he keeps very still, because the potential in uncertainty is almost worse than the constant oppression of fear.
Silence.
The swing chain creaks softly. Karofsky draws a circle in the tanbark with the toe of his tennis shoe. Kurt swallows. The bead of frigid sweat that winds down his backbone is almost refreshing.
Courage. It’s bullshit; Blaine doesn’t know a damn thing about what courage means. Blaine’s not the one curled up in the trenches, watching the mortars screaming through the sky. Blaine’s not the one who jumps every time a locker slams. Blaine’s not the one whose head would still be ringing two hours later in class, resonating off-key like a broken bell. Blaine’s not the one who craned his neck every night to look in the mirror and count the bruises on his shoulder-blades.
Kurt sets those shoulders (they’re half the width of Karofsky’s; this boy could literally tear him in two) and puts one foot forward, then the other. He watches the path and watches his feet gliding over it, practically of their own volition; it’s Blaine making him move. It’s not courage; it’s cowardice, thinking of what he’d have to say when Blaine calls if he had turned around and fled.
It’s worst when he’s just getting past, and Karofsky is out of his sightline. Kurt doesn’t believe in superstitions or omens or sixth senses or anything like that, but for once in his life, he can feel someone’s eyes boring into his back. His hands are trembling harder, and he wishes his heart would stop banging in his ears like Meg White on a bad day, because he’s straining for the soft crunch of rubber-soled sneakers touching down on tanbark and then swiveling to poise their owner for pursuit-
“Hummel,” Karofsky says.
Kurt wishes he hadn’t eaten breakfast. He wishes he hadn’t worn turquoise. He wishes he hadn’t picked his white hat to match, because it’ll fall off if he bolts, and he loves this hat, but he’ll leave it behind.
He wishes he’d never been born.
Having been born seems somewhat unnecessary, if the trajectory of his life so far has brought him to this.
He wishes he didn’t clench his jaw and turn and meet Karofsky’s burning black-hole gaze.
He wants to say something pithy-snap “Karofsky?” or, better, deadpan “David,” because then it’s a status choice. But he can barely force his breath through his throat; his voice will never fit.
“Why’d you do it?” Karofsky asks-demands. It’s more of an order than a question.
But it’s civil-at least more so than any of the interactions they’ve had for as long as Kurt’s flinching, Pavlovian mind can remember.
That’s… confusing. And the confusion sends fissures running all throughout the fear, and into those cracks seeps the anger.
It’s Karofsky’s fault.
It’s all Karofsky’s fault.
Everything that’s happened-everything Kurt’s felt, every stab of terror, every strangling swell of anxiety; every glance over his shoulder, every startle at shadows, every night waited out and every caffeine crash to follow; every numbing whiteout when too many kinds of desperation layered over each other’s holes-they’re all Karofsky.
For the first time, he starts to look just a little bit small. Maybe he is, compared to all of the aftershocks.
“Do what?” Kurt says. He knows his voice goes high when it sharpens, but he’d rather have the pointedness. “Call you on your shit? Try to get you expelled for a death threat? Decide to be gay? Christ, Karofsky; I didn’t realize-I’m so sorry I’ve made your life so fucking difficult.”
Karofsky doesn’t even shift to shrug it off. The boy is a mountain, and there’s nothing Kurt can do.
“Why didn’t you tell my dad about what I did?” he asks.
Kurt apprehends a sudden and deep understanding of the word falter-everything shudders to a halt and then… tips.
At its center, though, the question’s easy; it’s one he’s held himself accountable for a hundred-thousand times.
He clears his throat and looks without seeing at the decal on Karofsky’s shirt. “What difference would it have made? Neither of us would have gained anything, you would have been outed before you were ready, and everyone would have flipped.” Kurt looks Karofsky in the eyes again, holding his ground now. “I don’t care about revenge, Karofsky. I just want this to be over.”
Karofsky kicks at the ground again, summoning a spray of bark, and Kurt flinches. The shame comes hot on the heels of the reflex, but Karofsky says nothing.
At least, he doesn’t until Kurt musters his courage and turns to go.
“You shouldn’t have.”
“I’m sorry,” Kurt says, swiveling back to stare at him; “did I stutter? Or was some part of ‘I didn’t want to apply my biases to your burden’ objectionable to you?”
Karofsky’s eyes narrow. Either he’s been sitting here long enough to sunburn, or there’s blood rising to his cheeks-the kind of blood that will be pouring out of Kurt’s nose in a minute if he doesn’t stop being such an idiot.
“Hummel, now I owe you something,” Karofsky says.
“I don’t understand you,” Kurt says, coldly against the hot prickle of sweat where the hat sits on his hairline; against the white light pressing on his bare skin; against the heavy-thrumming tension strung between them, just waiting to snap back. “You treat me like a chew toy until I hurt and impose on everyone I care about just to get away from you, and then you owe me something? Well, owe me a promise that you’ll leave me the hell alone starting today, and let’s forget that you tore my life apart and call ourselves even.”
Karofsky gets up-with that smooth, incongruous, terrifying grace-and Kurt automatically takes three steps back.
“You plan to play a martyr for the rest of your life?” Karofsky asks. “’Cause that’s great if you want people to keep crucifying you, but you’re never going to get any respect.”
“I don’t want your respect,” Kurt spits. “I thought I made it pretty unequivocal that I never want to see you again. Ideally, I’d like to forget you ever existed, but I think I’ve probably got too many traumatic triggers for that to happen in the conceivable future.” It’s stupid to say what he says next, but he’s only been getting stupider since he chose not to run. “Do you know what it feels like, Karofsky? Do you have any idea what it’s like to wake up every morning and wonder if today’s the day you finally drown in your own fear?”
Karofsky’s eyes are dark and unreadable.
“Yeah,” he says. “I’ve got a pretty good fucking idea, actually.”
Kurt wants to turn around and walk away. He wants to say something cutting about boulders and glass houses, and then he wants to leave. He wants Karofsky to feel some fraction of the hurt he knows so intimately that it’s knitted to his soul.
But there’s some piece of incorruptible humanity in him, and deep, deep (deep, deep, deep, deep) down… he can’t let another person do this alone.
“People are starting to figure it out,” Karofsky says, and Kurt sees it-just a glimmer of a desperation he knows, of the miserable acceptance that being himself will never quite amount to enough. Karofsky looks at the corkscrew slide; it’s so old all the bolts are rusted over, and there’s better-left-unidentified gunk in the cracks between the plastic segments. They probably both played on it when they were kids, quite possibly at the same time. It was a monument then, something monstrous, and to slide down and survive was, for a child, like defying death itself. Kurt is hoping and hoping and hoping that someday, in retrospect, today looks like that slide does now.
Karofsky shoves his hands into his pockets even though it’s too warm for that, too. “I think Finn knows.”
Kurt would have expected an accusation in that, but he can’t pick one out. “I doubt it. If Finn ever figures it out, it’ll be two weeks after everyone else in the state of Ohio got the memo on your personal stationery.”
“I don’t have fucking stationery,” Karofsky says. “And I swear-fuck it; it doesn’t matter. The point is…”
“Finding a way to hide?” Kurt finishes, fighting the sardonic tone that comes so easily to his voice.
Karofsky glares at him, then glares at the ground, then kicks at the tanbark, then nods.
Kurt draws a fortifying breath. Blaine was wrong. Courage is not confronting his persecutor. It’s not taking the high road. It’s not turning the other cheek. It’s not fighting back.
Courage is stepping off of the path, crossing the tanbark, and sitting down in the other swing.
“Don’t try to overcompensate,” Kurt says, and his voice sounds steadier than he expects. “I had to make out with Brittany for almost half an hour before my dad could be bothered to walk in on us.”
Karofsky stands there for a minute, watching him warily, looking like an unmoored ship. Then he moves over and drops back into the seat of his swing again, and the chains clink.
“Everybody at McKinley High has made out with Brittany,” he says. “Including most of the teachers.”
“I’m going to have nightmares,” Kurt says calmly. “But that’s irrelevant, because that approach doesn’t work. Honestly, I think the best strategy is to try to stay completely neutral. Positioning yourself at either end of the spectrum makes you look suspicious.”
Karofsky jumps up again. “This is fucking stupid. I’m not talking to you about this.”
Kurt crosses his legs, folds his arms, and raises his eyebrows. “Fine by me. Lucky for you, Lima is full of gay mentors, and you can take your pick.”
Slightly tellingly, instead of strangling him with the swing chain, Karofsky puts his frustrated energy into pacing instead. “Shut the fuck up, Hummel. I have this reputation now; if I backtrack all of a sudden, everyone’s going to know some shit’s up.”
“That’s what I mean,” Kurt says. “You can’t do a one-eighty; you need to shoot for… a subtle gradation into inconspicuousness.”
Karofsky stops pacing, presumably because it’s hard to fix Kurt with that kind of a look while in motion.
“You’re giving me the blank stare,” Kurt observes. It’s eerily similar to the one he gets from Finn at least twice daily (and four to eight times when he’s been out shopping). “Why are you giving me the blank stare?”
“Because you talk in strings of fucking SAT words,” Karofsky says.
Kurt frowns at him. “Don’t make me tell you that you’re smart, Karofsky. That’s not why I’m here.”
Karofsky’s twice-the-width-of-Kurt’s shoulders tense. “Don’t fucking patronize me, Hummel.”
The urge to slap his forehead is extremely strong, but he’ll mess up his hat. “Thank you for proving my point with poignant irony.”
“That’s exactly my point!” Karofsky fires back.
Kurt bites the inside of his cheek for a long moment, focusing on the pinch of it, and then takes another deep breath of dead-humid air. “Never mind. I was trying to say that if you change things a little bit at a time, no one will really notice.”
“See, that finally sounds like English,” Karofsky mutters. He scuffs his feet at the tanbark, taking his hands out of the pockets of his jeans and then putting them back again. It’s slightly strange seeing him out of his letterman jacket. Kurt wonders briefly if he stumbled into a wormhole en route to the park and subsequently fell into an alternate universe, but it’s probably just too hot today for extra layers, whatever they’re made of. “It’s still bullshit, though. I can’t change.”
“Well, you can’t keep going like you are,” Kurt says. “And those are kind of your only two options.”
“Obviously I can,” Karofsky says, “since I have been, and it’s fine.”
Kurt bristles, but he manages to stay in the swing for now-not that he’d be any more threatening if he stood up to face the wall of muscle on the other side of this argument.
“I take it back,” he says. “You’re an idiot, Karofsky. I mean, honestly? If you think being so scared you have to smash people into lockers to make yourself feel big and being so repressed that you-well, you do what you did after that counts as ‘fine’… then you’re not just stupid; you’re hopeless. And there’s nothing I can do for you.”
Karofsky’s glare still makes Kurt’s stomach twist itself into knots. “Big goddamn surprise.”
Kurt should just leave him to it. Kurt should get up and walk away, because Karofsky hasn’t done anything to earn his generosity-much closer to the opposite, really. No one would ever blame Kurt for giving up now; he’s tried, and he’s been brave about it. This is enough. He’s more than paid his dues.
But he’s the only person in the world who’s met the real David Karofsky-who’s seen through all the static.
“Can we talk about it?” he says, even though he’d rather jump into a pit of alligators while wearing Lady GaGa’s meat dress. “What happened in the locker room. I think-I feel like we’re both avoiding it for different reasons, and… it’ll really help clear the air if we can face it together.”
Karofsky is silent for a long moment. His back’s turned, and Kurt can see the tautness of every muscle straining to take this conversation back-to unspeak every word of it. Kurt can’t say he doesn’t sympathize.
He also can’t say he doesn’t expect The Fury to be getting acquainted with the bridge of his nose in a matter of seconds.
“I’ve been right all along,” Karofsky says, curling his fingers slowly into fists, and ohdearGod Kurt is dead. “Glee Club really does turn everybody into a homo-hippie.”
“Well, you’re halfway there,” Kurt snaps. “If you’d rather sing about it, I’d be happy to oblige.”
Karofsky’s gaze must be burning a hole in the teeter-totter; just his voice is incinerating. “Fuck Glee Club; fuck talking about it; and fuck you, Hummel, because nothing happened, so there’s nothing to say.”
“Excuse me?” Kurt cuts in, and he’s up out of the swing now, which is stupid, too, because he can’t deny how much smaller he is when there’s a direct comparison. “It was something on so many levels I don’t even know where to start. Are you attracted to me?”
Karofsky whirls on him, a towering presence of blazing eyes and an absolutely staggering potential to hurt. “Fuck off, Hummel.”
“What, then?” Kurt asks, persevering through the tightness in his chest, through the horrific reality that he’s literally standing in Karofsky’s shadow and shaking all over. “To the concept of me? To the idea of being out and proud and honest with yourself? Am I some kind of metaphor to you?”
Karofsky’s hands rise, and Kurt braces for impact, his heart pausing in its feverish throbbing just long enough to slam down into his diaphragm at the thought of getting all the blood out of these clothes.
He flinches when Karofsky fists both hands in his shirtfront and hauls him in close-dangerously close, dizzyingly close, so close that Kurt can feel Karofsky’s hot, fast breath on his face, and everything beyond the other boy’s outline blurs into a haze of heat.
“I am not a fucking AP English project, Hummel,” Karofsky hisses. “It was nothing, and if you bring it up one more time-”
What can he promise that he hasn’t before?
“If it’s nothing,” Kurt says, “do it again.”
Partly he needs to know. Partly he needs to be wanted.
No one except David Karofsky has ever wanted him before.
The silence goes on for years, for decades, for at least four full seconds and possibly four and a half. For this one, unstable moment, they’re virtually the same-Kurt sees the same gears spinning without catching behind Karofsky’s eyes; sees the same fear; the same something-like-a-hope, but it’s tainted and muddled and sick-
Karofsky opens his hands, steps back, turns around, and walks away.
Kurt swallows a few times. He stumbles back and reaches for the base of the swing, putting a hand against the metal pole for balance. He swallows again and musters his voice enough to call at Karofsky’s retreating back.
“I’ll be here at the same time tomorrow whether you are or not.”
He wasn’t expecting an answer, and he doesn’t get one.
Kurt Hummel is stupid.
Kurt Hummel is sitting on the-what is this stuff they make playgrounds out of? Rubber composite?-steps that lead up to the platform styled like a spaceship, leaning into the insufficient shade cast by the console.
He doesn’t really know what to anticipate. It all depends on how desperate Karofsky’s isolation has led him to become.
Kurt goes back and forth on the question. Obviously Karofsky presents himself as the ultimate tough guy, but-equally obviously, at least to the privileged few-centimeters past that, he’s a wreck.
So Kurt does the stupid thing and waits.
He hasn’t mentioned yesterday to anyone. He loves his father more than anything in the universe, but Dad would jump to conclusions and then jump for a firearm, and Kurt can’t afford overprotection when the only way to get through to Karofsky is to be even more vulnerable than he is. Finn… is Finn; enough said. Carole would worry about him; Mercedes already does, and the tentative What’s up, diva? Everybody R-E-S-P-E-C-Ting your space? emails she’d send while he was at Dalton kind of broke his heart.
He should have told Blaine-if only because Blaine’s pretty much the single other person out there who would be able to contextualize, knowing what he does. But even Blaine wouldn’t quite understand, because Blaine has never hated himself down to his core.
Kurt pushes his hair back and plucks at the collar of today’s neon T-shirt, trying to circulate a little bit of air. He wasn’t exactly watching the clock yesterday to time when he arrived, so it’s not like he can say Karofsky’s late.
Anyway, “late” requires intent to show. For all Kurt knows, he’s wasting two precious hours of a summertime Tuesday on a dead end. For all he knows, he got his revenge after all, and he’s scared Karofsky off for good. It’ll be back to Dalton in August, and everything will be hunky-dory, except of course for the intense psychological trauma and the panic attacks and the sea of navy uniforms that makes him feel like his lungs are full of water even when he sings. Except for not being strong enough to refuse his parents’ sacrifice and fight his battles instead of abandoning all of the small victories when he flees the field.
And look how well that worked given where he is now.
To say that Kurt’s feeling cynical by the time Karofsky solidifies amongst the heat shimmers in the distance is roughly akin to describing Santana as a slightly vindictive young woman.
Karofsky doesn’t look Kurt in the eyes as he approaches, kick-shuffles his way through the tanbark, and takes up leaning against one of the pillars that supports the stairs. He folds his arms, looks over the park-Kurt’s ingrained paranoia doesn’t have to double-check; they’re the only ones here-and exhales with just a hint of a sigh.
“Shitty weather,” he says.
That’s a peace offering if Kurt’s ever seen one.
…it’s a really damn good thing Kurt’s gayer than a newly-decorated maypole; Karofsky drops hints and speaks in code more than most girls.
“Abysmal,” Kurt says, keeping his tone light and noncommittal. “I’m sure it’s an educational conspiracy that the only time they free us is when it’s too hot to get into trouble.”
Karofsky is quiet for a moment. “You’re too much of a goody-two-shoes to make trouble even when the weather is good.”
“Doesn’t tend to be a problem,” Kurt replies. “Cliché as it is, trouble usually finds me. Then it beats the crap out of me and takes my lunch money.”
“School lunch at McKinley is a rip-off,” Karofsky says. “And probably poisoned.”
“Preach,” Kurt says, and he thinks-it’s hard to tell from this angle-that the corners of Karofsky’s mouth twitch.
There’s an almost-comfortable pause.
“Is it any better at Pansy Academy?” Karofsky asks.
“There are lots of organic and vegetarian options,” Kurt says.
“Take that as a ‘no.’”
Kurt wishes he wasn’t grinning, but it’s too late. “Shut up; I like leeks.”
Karofsky glances at him, and his expression is priceless. “What the fuck is a leek?”
“I’ll show you sometime,” Kurt says airily. “They don’t bite very hard.”
“Oh, my God,” Karofsky says. “Go to hell, Hummel.”
Time to start asking the hard questions.
Kurt takes another deep breath, drawing the heat into his lungs. “Do you believe in that? Hell for the homosexuals, I mean.”
Karofsky is utterly motionless-except to blink-for so long that Kurt has to stop holding his breath.
“I don’t know,” he says when the moment’s passed. “They say it in church all the fucking time.”
If Kurt learned one thing from his dad’s heart attack, it was to tell the people that you love just how much you need them every single day, because Murphy’s Law dictates that when shit happens, it’s always after you’ve had a fight. If he learned a second thing, it’s that you can’t argue with a belief.
He crosses his legs, sets one elbow on his knee, and sits for a minute, untangling the threads of exactly what he wants to say. Karofsky glances at him more than once but doesn’t interrupt.
“I’m not religious,” Kurt says, “but to my understanding, in the long run, what God wills is absolute. Is that right?”
Karofsky is frowning-he has remarkably expressive eyebrows-but he says, “I guess.”
“Okay. To my understanding, the Bible is man’s best attempt at explaining the will of God, and priests do their best to interpret that for the rest of us. Fair so far?”
Karofsky shifts uncomfortably. “I don’t know. Sure, whatever.”
“And God is so incredibly vast and powerful that He transcends humanity, correct?”
Karofsky avoids looking at him. “Where the hell are you going with this, Hummel?”
Kurt waits until Karofsky’s gaze darts to him and holds it. “All I’m saying is that if God is… well, God, then the Bible can’t quite conceptualize Him, because it was transcribed by human beings. And the priest interpreting the Bible adds another layer of human fallibility. So if a priest tells you that God thinks you’re going to hell, I’d say there’s a pretty good chance that God’s real message got lost in translation. This…” A spark of bewilderment tending towards horror lights up in him as he sees his right hand reach out and press his index finger into the center of Karofsky’s chest. “…is between you and God.”
He can almost-kind-of feel the heart beating just a few inches from his fingertip. Then Karofsky steps back, and Kurt withdraws his hand before he gets it ripped off and shoved down his throat.
They spend another long, silent moment looking at each other, Karofsky suspicious, Kurt trying to seem innocent and well-intentioned. He’s hoping that his baby blues will get him off the hook. It always works with Carole.
Maybe it’s worked here; maybe it hasn’t-Karofsky looks away.
“What denomination are you?” Kurt asks. “If it’s not too personal.”
“It is,” Karofsky says flatly.
Yes, Kurt can take a hint.
He admires his shoe-after all, it’s his shoe, so it is good to look at-and scuffs it against the possibly-rubber-composite step.
“You got plans for the summer?” Karofsky mutters after a while.
“Sort of.” Kurt repositions his foot away from what might, many eons ago, have been chewing gum. “I’m going to work for my dad a little, but he doesn’t have the budget for much time, and since it’s going towards the same thing anyway… I figure I might apply to work at the toy store downtown to try to get a little money together.”
Karofsky’s quiet for a moment. “You’re going back to Pansy School?”
Kurt folds his arms on his knees. “Where else am I supposed to go?” He wasn’t expecting an answer this time either. At least Karofsky’s predictable in one respect. “And as much as I may sometimes object to the character-or lack of character-of the student body… I think Dalton’s good for me. It’s hard work, and I feel like I’m actually thinking.” The sweat starting to bead on his forehead will sabotage his bangs; he does some surreptitious damage control-and then pauses to wonder why he cares how Karofsky thinks he looks. “And it sounds mercenary, but it’s going to be excellent to put on my college applications if I can keep my grades up. I need that. I need to get out of this town.”
“Hummel,” Karofsky says disinterestedly, “if you put up with Lima’s bullshit, nothing is going to faze you anywhere else.”
“I believe that’s New York, actually,” Kurt says. “And the phrase is ‘If you can make it here’-”
“How’s your pansy boyfriend?”
“I don’t have a pansy boyfriend. I don’t have any kind of boyfriend, inconceivable as I know that sounds.”
Karofsky can’t take a hint.
“The Pansy School boyfriend,” he says, quietly still-quietly so far. There’s a rumble underneath it, like an engine turning over. “The one you told.”
“He wasn’t about to tell anyone else,” Kurt says. “He just wanted to protect me.”
“By trying to out me in front of half the school,” Karofsky says, and there’s a jagged edge to his voice. “Nice fuckin’ guy, your pansy boyfriend. Nice of him to tell you how to act and then leave.”
“He’s not my boyfriend, he’s not like that, and he is nice,” Kurt says, hearing his own voice rise, unable to stop himself from getting to his feet to join it. “He just wanted to help you, too, and if you’d been willing to listen-”
“In the middle of the stairwell?” Karofsky looks at him-from below for the first time Kurt can think of-and narrows his eyes until they’re gleaming slits in the too-bright sunshine. “Yeah, Hummel. They should just make the guy a fucking saint for knowing better than everybody else what their lives are like, and what they should do and say and be just because he’s been that. Do his parents pay for his asshole lessons, or do they give you those for free at Dalton? ’Cause you’re never going to beat him in that class, college apps or not.”
“Stop it!” There’s that rough-almost-breaking note to his scream; Kurt hates that about his voice; every order starts to sound like a plea. “Blaine is the only person in my entire life that I could talk to about what you did to me. And you’re right about Lima, Karofsky; and you’re right about me-I’m not taking this shit from you.”
“Quit being such a fucking drama queen,” Karofsky says, an almost impressively distinct curl of disdain to his lip. “I can spot douchebags like you can find Macy’s sales-”
“That’s because you are one!” Kurt shouts at him.
Karofsky is not happy. Kurt is back to wondering whether death will be efficient in Karofsky’s impatience or slow and agonizing to fit the crime.
“Look,” Karofsky hisses, “the dude was playing both of us, because his whole life so far’s told him he’s got everything figured out. Just because he’s the first fag who ever wanted to talk to you doesn’t me-”
Kurt jumps off of the side of the stairs, ignoring the flare of pain in his knees and the spray of tanbark as he hits the ground, and starts for home before he gets into another fight he absolutely cannot win.
“Hummel!” Karofsky calls after him. “Forget it! Come on! Do you have to be this much of a bitch all the time?”
Never mind. Kurt’s going to fight this one anyway; at least he’ll die in a blaze of glory for a worthy cause.
He storms back and gets close enough to feel the heat radiating off of Karofsky’s broad, barrel chest.
“Number one,” he hisses, fearless and almost blind with the anger teeming in his battered heart; “if you call Blaine a fag again, I’m writing a letter to the editor of the Lima Herald about institutionalized homophobia and closeted gays, I’m going to use your first and last name, and I’m going to mail a clipping of it to Jacob Ben Israel. Number two: if you call me a bitch one more time, I’m leaving right now, and if you ever come near me again, I’ll file for a restraining order.”
Kurt pants a little to catch his breath, squirming inwardly at the knowledge of how farcical his tiny-boy rage must look to a freaking defensive lineman. But so far, Karofsky is silent, staring down at him, dark eyes on his, mouth in a line.
Kurt is not looking at Karofsky’s mouth.
Kurt is never going to look at Karofsky’s mouth ever again, for as long as he lives; and if he does, he’s going to put his own eyes out with a mechanical pencil, as Oedipus would have done had he attended Dalton and been obsessed with school supplies.
“That’s really kind of fucked-up,” Karofsky says after a brief eternity of Kurt trying to catch his breath without looking like the idiot he is. “You’re the gayest person in Ohio, but you’ve got more balls than anyone I’ve ever met.”
It takes Kurt a moment to realize that the choking, hiccup-like sound that just wriggled out of his throat was at least forty percent laughter.
He fumbles behind him for the cool metal of the staircase railing and sits down on the lowest step this time.
“Karofsky,” he says, “what in the hell am I doing here?”
The nuances of this question seem to have evaded its audience. “…talking. You kind of do that a lot.”
“No,” Kurt says. “Why am I talking to you?”
“Well, there’s no one else here, so I guess it was either that or talking to yourself.”
Kurt puts a hand over his mouth. He’s laughing again, only a little bit hysterically.
Karofsky scowls. “What?”
“Nothing,” Kurt says. “It’s just-doesn’t this occur to you as the slightest bit weird?”
Karofsky shrugs and kicks the pole. “My whole fucking life is weird.”
Kurt pushes his hair back and then tries to fix it, which doesn’t work so well without a mirror. “If we’re going to keep…” No. “We need to set some ground rules here. Okay?”
Karofsky shrugs again. Then he kicks the pole again. Kurt takes that as acquiescence.
“Let’s start simply,” Kurt says. “You don’t get down on my friends-any of them-and I won’t push you on any subject you don’t want to talk about.”
He wasn’t really intending to press Karofsky if he ever ran into another of those topics-it comes back to the whole not wanting to die thing-but this needs to sound like a mutual deal, and he needs to make Karofsky feel safe.
In a shocking turn of events, Karofsky raises his shoulders and knocks his shoe against the pole.
“Whatever,” he says. “Sure.”
That will have to do.
“Fabulous,” Kurt says. “And I know fabulous.” He looks at Karofsky sideways. “To go back to the previous thread of conversation, what are your summer plans?”
Karofsky… shrugs.
This may be hopeless after all.
“I’m just kind of staying out of the house,” he says after a moment or two. “I’m kind of staying away from… everyone.”
It’s unsettling-to say the least-to think of David Karofsky, linebacker and life-ruiner, pitcher of slushies and practitioner of Jungle Law, as… lonely.
Then again, it was more than unsettling to adjust to thinking of him as a deeply-closeted homosexual fueled by fear and self-loathing in equal quantities, and Kurt’s already had to do that.
“Is there a particular reason?” Kurt asks. “Other than the general-and completely reasonable-feeling that you’re deliberately deceiving everyone when you hang out with people you aren’t going to tell.”
“Mostly that,” Karofsky says, and then he looks startled that he did.
Kurt knows very well that he’s still walking on a minefield, but it’s getting to be kind of like Minesweeper now, where there are color-coded numbers to steer him away from sudden, explosive death.
“I hear you,” he says. “I hated that period. It just sucks.”
As he’d held his breath and hoped, at the offhand implication that it’s a phase and will eventually end, there’s a flicker in Karofsky’s expression of something akin to comfort.
“I was lucky,” Kurt goes on, masking the cautious particularity with which he selects his words. “I had Mercedes-and New Directions. Obviously many of them weren’t cool with it in any way, shape, or form, but they came around, because… that’s what friends do. They prioritize who you are over what you are, at least in the long run.”
“I can’t join fucking Glee Club,” Karofsky says. Kurt spares a portion of a moment to be amused at the not-unappealing thought of fucking Glee Club, because every single person in New Directions is extremely attractive, at least aesthetically speaking. “I was only in that shit for a week, and you probably heard how that went.”
“I didn’t have to hear about it,” Kurt tells him. “I saw the halftime show. David, you were good.”
Karofsky kicks the tanbark this time, slightly more viciously than he usually does. “Fuck off, Hummel; it’s not funny.”
“That’s because I’m not joking,” Kurt says. He crosses his legs at the knee again and raises his eyebrows. “I am an unchallenged-except for Rachel-connoisseur of musical theater and all related enterprises. I know talent when I see it.”
Karofsky’s face is dark and kind of pinched now. “Seriously, Hummel. Don’t fucking start with me.”
That would be a blank square in the corner surrounded by squares blazoned with the number one.
And Kurt did hear about it, because McKinley High is small, and eventually even Rachel gets tired of talking about the love dodecahedron she claims a vertex of. Kurt heard about the struggles, the reversals, the slushies, the quitting, and the comebacks. He’s known all of those sensations, and he’s the only one who can piece together Karofsky’s journey in full, from the inside.
“The thing is,” Kurt says slowly, “you don’t have to be in New Directions to sing. The community aspect of it is really helpful, of course, for the collaborations and the feedback, but you can treat it like a hobby on your own time and get the glee without the club.”
There’s a pause.
“You just got even gayer,” Karofsky says. “I didn’t think that was possible.”
“You can’t convince me you don’t sing in the shower,” Kurt persists, choosing to ignore that comment before he picks another ill-fated fight.
“Can we not talk about what I do and definitely don’t do in the shower, Hummel?” Karofsky says.
“What’s your favorite song?” Kurt asks.
“I don’t have one.”
“Like hell. Everybody does. What’s one of your favorite songs, then?”
“I don’t listen to music,” Karofsky says. “I’m deaf.”
Kurt stares at him. He doesn’t crack a smile.
“You have an extraordinarily good deadpan,” Kurt says.
He cracks a smile.
“Unfortunately, if you don’t suggest a favorite song for us to duet to,” Kurt says airily, “I guess I’ll have to pick one of mine.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Karofsky mutters. “I dunno. I like-guy stuff. Classic rock and metal and shit.”
Kurt pauses. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to be a little bit more specific.”
“Go into Finn’s iTunes and pick something that’s not on a playlist called ‘Glee Club Is My Life’ or ‘I Love Rachel And/Or Quinn.’”
Kurt stares for a second, and then he’s laughing again, incredulous but genuine. Karofsky cracks another smile.
“You’re kind of a dick, Karofsky,” Kurt says. “It’s awesome.”
The smile gets a little wider.
“I’ll find something tonight,” Kurt goes on. This is the part that might take off and might spectacularly fail, and if it’s the latter, he could be running for his life in a second. “I’m pretty sure Finn’s going to be out until dinnertime the day after tomorrow, and my parents are both working. If you wanted to hang out somewhere with air-conditioning and carpeting that’s made of something other than tanbark… well, yeah. We could do that.” He watches Karofsky’s face. “Better acoustics, too.”
Karofsky glances at him and then at the trees Kurt always scraped his knees climbing because he was so small and so stubborn even at the age of six. “If you’re bullshitting me, Hummel-”
“I’m not. Air-conditioning, carpet, couches, and food, but you have to sing. Take it or leave it.”
Karofsky sets his jaw, and his eyes narrow again. Kurt’s starting to think that’s an automatic reflex-or some kind of last-ditch shield.
“What kind of food?” Karofsky asks.
“Slushies,” Kurt says.
“You b-” Karofsky grits his teeth. “God damn you, Hummel.”
“I thought we decided that was between me and Him.”
Karofsky shakes his head, but not before Kurt sees the telltale flicker of a smile.
Kurt’s phone tweedles cheerfully, and he fishes it out of his pocket to see the text.
It’s from Finn. Kurt is more resigned than surprised when he reads help broke th oven nuthn on fire bt mom will kill me help?
Kurt sighs. “Apparently I need to go rescue my dumbass brother.” He hesitates, even though-God, he’s being so stupid. “See you Thursday at my place?”
“Same time?” Karofsky asks.
“Yeah, if it works for you.”
Karofsky pauses for a second. “Given how much you save his ass, maybe Finn should be the one at Pansy School.”
Kurt grins. “He’d flunk out. See you later.”
He can still feel Karofsky’s gaze on his back as he heads off-a faint prickling on his shoulder-blades, just slightly warmer than the day’s heat. It still makes him jumpy, which he understands; the kind of psychological conditioning he’s unintentionally undergone can’t be glossed over by two conversations in the park.
But it’s different. It’s better, at least for now.
Once Kurt has swept in to WikiHow oven repair (not his best idea, but no one gets burnt or electrocuted, and it seems to work) and drifted back to his bedroom, waving off Finn’s groveling thanks, he curls up in his bowl chair, chews on his lip, and hits his second speed-dial.
“What’s up?” Mercedes asks, picking up halfway through the second ring.
“Not a lot,” Kurt says. “You want to do coffee tomorrow?”
There is a brief silence.
“We could do coffee now,” Mercedes offers carefully.
This is Girl Code.
“It’s not urgent,” Kurt says warmly. “Tomorrow’s fine. Is ten in the morning good for you?”
“You bet,” Mercedes says, sounding slightly relieved. “See you then.”
“Perfect,” Kurt sighs, meaning it. “You will always be my favorite, chica. Ta.”
“Later, Kurt.”
Kurt puts the phone down. Then he picks it up again and navigates to the iTunes store, where he types guy stuff into the query bar.
iTunes thinks he is an idiot. He has to concede the point.
[Chapter 2]